Monthly Archives: September 2017

It’s almost 2 October, the day Dr Boogaloo and The Girl Who Lost Her Laughter hits the shelves.

But what has got me almost more excited, chuffed even (I have always wanted to use the word chuffed) is something they call in the publishing world, a SHELF WOBBLER.

Now when I received the email from my publisher about said SHELF WOBBLER, I had no idea what a SHELF WOBBLER was!

At first I thought it must be some device that caused the shelf to wobble, which in turn caused my book to fall off the shelf whenever someone walked past. The person walking past would then pick up my book believing they had in fact caused it to fall off the shelf. ‘Ingenious! That should help sell a few more books,’ I thought to myself.

But it turns out I was wrong. That’s not what a SHELF WOBBLER is. Then I thought perhaps a SHELF WOBBLER is some sort of weird insect thingy found in book shops that lived on shelves and had a wobbly kind of walk.

Wrong again.

When I googled ‘insects + habitat = book shop’ it came up blank.

So then, despite the risk of looking like a total potato head, I just had to phone the publisher because I’d wasted a whole morning trying to figure out WHAT exactly a SHELF WOBBLER was!

Well, would you believe it, a SHELF WOBBLER, doesn’t wobble shelves at all. A SHELF WOBBLER, hangs off a shelf and wobbles. Its job is to attract your attention. It’s supposed to sort of say, “Hey, look over here, this book is a ripper!’

Here’s my SHELF WOBBLER. Unfortunately it’s a real world SHELF WOBBLER and not an online SHELF WOBBLER so it doesn’t wobble at all online. If you’re on an Ipad just jiggle it around and it should do a pretty good impersonation of a real life SHELF WOBBLER.